I’m a week late to this blog entry, but wow… Andy Whitman writes about music better than just about anybody I know. And now he’s posted a home-run entry about Harry Potter.

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Yesterday I posted news about the new book on Mother Teresa. Here’s more on Mother Teresa’s dark night of the soul, from Amy Wellborn.

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Here’s a list you haven’t seen before: John Wilson, the voracious reader who edits Books and Culture, rates his top five books on atheism. Know before you debate!

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Doug Cummings has seen Satyajit Ray’s shorts. I mean… two short films that he made early in his career.

Kapurush (74 minutes) and Mahapurush (65 minutes) are narrative sketches that allowed Ray to subtly experiment with form and style; as such, they worked against expectations at the time (“Many of Ray’s critics think that Ray is making too many films in too short a span of time,” scoffed one Bengali journalist) and were largely dismissed upon their release. But according to Andrew Robinson’s book on Ray, the filmmaker said, “These are twin films I have considerable affection for; I have a pretty high opinion of Kapurush myself and I was disappointed by the response.” I’m leaning toward Ray’s assessment.

Of course, most moviegoers haven’t even seen the Apu trilogy. (I hadn’t until a couple of years ago.) And I’d encourage anyone who loves great storytelling to seek it out, even if you can’t do better than the shoddy VHS or DVD editions currently available in the U.S.